The four acts of Swan Lake are a high mountain to climb for a young dancer making his debut in the lead role, but this was the task that fell to Vadim Muntagirov on Wednesday. Siberian-born Muntagirov, who turned 20 this month, graduated from the Royal Ballet School just a year ago, having won a scholarship in 2006, and was quickly snapped up by English National Ballet director Wayne Eagling. ENB are not short of senior male dancers, but it was Muntagirov, who had never before danced the role of Prince Siegfried, that Eagling chose to open the season at the Albert Hall last week. To make matters even more challenging, this was the company's in-the-round version, choreographed in 1997 by Derek Deane. With no set, no stage-front, and the audience on all sides, this is an easy production in which to lose your bearings.

Little surprise, then, that Muntagirov was wide-eyed with nerves when he made his first entrance, and that his first leap saw him at sixes and sevens. His opening night Swan Queen was supposed to be Polina Semionova, the Bolshoi-trained ballerina of Berlin Staatsoper, but in the event a visa mix-up saw her arrival delayed for 24 hours. Perhaps this was a blessing in disguise, for she was replaced by ENB's Daria Klimentova, whom Muntagirov knows well, and with whom he had rehearsed the ballet.

Thirty-eight-year-old Klimentova is a highly experienced principal dancer with all the qualities of line and musicality demanded by the double role of Odette-Odile, but the cavernous Albert Hall is a near-impossible venue in which to deliver a nuanced interpretation. Instead, with great subtlety and tact, Klimentova sublimated her performance to her partner's, positioning herself with especial care for the lifts, aligning herself to his rhythm, and buoying him up with her steady, serene gaze. And with these attentions, Muntagirov unfroze, relaxing what Dame Joan Sutherland used to call the GPE (General Pained Expression), and reassuming possession of his tall, elegant physique.

The Act 2 adagio, with its overhead lifts, was survived rather than triumphed over, but in Act 3 Muntagirov finally unleashed the prodigious gifts that have seen him win a string of international student competitions. His Black Swan variation and coda was impeccable, with high, precisely drawn turns in the air that seemed to snap from the music's surface like wave-caps, a bravura series of grandes pirouettes to complement Klimentova's fouettés, and a beautiful, soaring final manège of split jetés that had the audience shouting its applause.

And at the curtain call, with touching self-deprecation, Klimentova muted her presence so that Muntagirov could take the cheers. There is, at times, an elusive resonance between an older ballerina and a younger male dancer that performers of similar age cannot access. That was the case on Wednesday; not so much in the tale of the Swan Queen and her prince, but in the human story of two performers, and it was enthralling.

Mark Bruce's Love and War, which opened at The Place last week, is also performed in the round. As in his 2006 production, Sea of Bones, Bruce has mined classical mythology for archetypes, and for narratives that just keep repeating themselves. Here, he names his dancers after gods, goddesses, and characters from the Iliad and the Oresteia. Roles are then re-assigned, stories overlaid, and appropriate tracks from Bruce's playlist assigned to each tableau. Sometimes the irony is wonderfully apposite, as when Joanne Fong's prophetess Cassandra, who can foresee her own onrushing death, dances with anguished intensity to Tom Waits's "You Can Never Hold Back Spring". Or when Caroline Hotchkiss's Iphigenia rides sidesaddle on Darren Ellis's Ares, god of war. Does she know, as she bumps along to Sparklehorse's "Homecoming Queen", that she is to be sacrificed by her father, Agamemnon, so that the Greek fleet can sail for Troy? Cassandra certainly does. The most entertaining sequence, though, is the murder of Agamemnon in his bath by his wife, Clytemnestra. Reworking the myth, Bruce turns Fong into a giant spider, who drowns her husband to the sound of "I Hate the Way You Love" by the Kills, flying the flag for sexually frustrated wives everywhere.